Paintings by Dror Cohen for Harper’s Magazine A ten-minute coffee break was called on set, time Laura used to continue her keen, proprietary staking out of those lives she might…

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How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After…

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Collages by Catie O’Leary for Harper’s Magazine There is someone in the house. Heard as he moves around the room upstairs. When he gets out of bed or when he…

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Paintings by Yann Kebbi for Harper’s Magazine i did trip over a very small boy I did trip over a small boy who fell down and cried, and I feared…

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Illustration by Leonie Bos The night before my brother’s second wedding, he held a rehearsal dinner that was, per contemporary tradition, a rehearsal only for the pained social interactions that…

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Illustrations by Miguel Manich At the time of the adman’s death, Gary Minihan had been with the Postal Service for thirty-five years. He spent the first thirty as a letter…

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Years later, my grandmother would still tell people that I learned to swim in a movie star’s pool, though she always said this with the same slanted tone and pinched…

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You never realize how accustomed your eye grows to a familiar variety of human species in a particular place, including that place’s indigenous freaks and weirdos, until a bizarre specimen…

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Collages by Jim Goldberg, from Coming and Going, which was published in September by MACK © Jim Goldberg/Magnum. Courtesy the artist and MACK In recollection it seems less memory than…

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I’m going to take a minute now to see if I can get my dates straight. Peter and I were married in June 1962. In early December, Peter told me…

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My friend was a widow, not really old but already a widow twice. You think of Oscar Wilde’s wisecrack. To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune, to…

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Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and…

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Photographs by Lisa Elmaleh for Harper’s Magazine © The artist I was splitting wood at sunset when the cat jumped up on the chopping block in front of me, arched…

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They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,      Ghetto and Judenstrass, in murk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure      The life of anguish and the death…

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April said that when she got healthy—if she did, she said, if—she wanted to have Julia’s body. It was the ideal, April said, curvy but still thin enough, I should…

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In an effort to replenish its anemic membership with younger blood, the New Amsterdam Club has, among other measures, relaxed its dress code, allowed the use of cell phones, and…

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Some of the guys joined back up for Korea, to be Marines once more, to sail back across the Pacific Ocean and kill different Asians. Bob considered the prospect, but…

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A departure yard in Chicago (detail), December 1942, by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Leave the two men stranded along the railroad tracks outside Chicago,…

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My father told me this story. He said it happened one Christmas Eve many years ago. A boy was walking alone alongside a highway and saw the lights of the…

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